XDA

Thoughts on politics, law, culture and guns from an eclectic, but mainly center-right point of view

Thursday, October 31, 2013

Lie Upon Lie Upon Lie

Our President's often repeated lie about keeping the policy and doctor you like has received sufficient coverage. Let's move on to the new ones. Here's a sample of several from the extreme left wing paper the Guardian:

In fact, it's yet another reminder that, for all its hiccups, Obamacare
is well on its way to transforming how Americans receive healthcare –
and almost certainly for the better. For most Americans, Obamacare will
mean little evident change. If, like the vast majority of Americans, you
receive your insurance through your employer today … you will continue
to receive it from them tomorrow. And you will do so with greater
security and more flexibility if you leave your job.

Almost certainly the mandated coverages will not be for the better. The policies and plans will certainly cost more and contain things that many individuals don't need or want. Oh, and the deductibles will almost certainly rise. Making you pay more for things you don't want is not better coverage. I'm the best judge of what I need for coverage. Not Ms. Sebelius, not the President, not a faceless bureaucrat--me.

I'm not sure the Guardian is keeping up on current events but many businesses are dropping health insurance coverage for their employees' family or for the employees themselves. This had alreadybeenhappening. It's been in all the media. Also, in case the Guardian writer is not aware, the employer mandate was illegally delayed for a year so the real scope of what will happen as it finally kicks in is unknown, although we have a lot of clues and it appears very unlikely that a "vast majority" of Americans will continue to receive health insurance from their employers. I'm not sure I would call my job more secure if I'm the 51st employee who puts the company into the maw of Obamacare. There's more.

Forcing insurance companies to offer better coverage – and a minimal set
of benefits with no trapdoors for consumers – is an unqualified good.

This is merely tautology. Better is good. But, aside from who gets to decide which is good or better, there is the cost to contend with. A policy that covers everything but costs $200,000/yr. is not an unqualified good for someone making $94,200. It gets worse.

Of course, there will be some Americans who will end up experiencing
actual sticker shock in the form of higher premiums. But let's be clear,
this is an incredibly small segment of the population. It's basically
healthy, young people who earn enough money not to qualify for subsidies
(which are available to Americans who make up to 400 times the poverty level,
or $92,000 for a family of four) and still buy their insurance on the
individual market. But even if you do end up paying higher premiums, you
will have coverage that actually can be described as insurance, with
broader benefits and actual security if you become seriously ill.

Let's first take up the genius author's math problem here. $92,000 divided by 400 is $230 which is not the poverty threshold in America (perhaps in Haiti or Somalia). I think he means 400% or four times the poverty threshold. Let's see: The poverty threshold for a family of four is $23,550 times 4 is $94,200. He said $92,000--close enough. I see, the higher premiums that poorer people won't be able to pay won't merely represent spreading the cost to the pool of pre-existing condition sufferers and old people not yet on Medicare, and for certain mandated coverages neither needed nor necessary. No, this added expense will be because the health insurance that was cheaper was so bad it wasn't actually insurance and the moronic losers who chose it will have been saved from being defrauded by the super terrific Obamacare. It's so simple. Obama care is better no matter how expensive, unwanted, or unpopular most people perceive it to be, because the superior genius class (except for math) Guardian staff says so. Any evidentiary support beyond merely repeating it's better?

None.

Here's another telling paragraph about lying:

Still, President Obama is hardly off the hook here. When he sold healthcare reform,
he promised "nothing … requires you to change what you have." That
wasn't exactly true. But it was indicative of the rosy manner in which
the administration described a post-Obamacare America.

It was just a little lie, no doubt caused by well meaning exuberance over all the good the ACA was going to do. Wanker. Final lie.

Obamacare's current problems, while frustrating, shall pass. What we'll
be left with is very likely a profound transformation in America's
healthcare system. The changes wrought by Obamacare are already leading to historic reductions in healthcare costs.

You think that the link embedded in the claim that Obama care is already leading to historic reductions in healthcare costs would lead to a site where there was some evidence that healthcare costs had actually reduced. No such luck. The costs of the approved insurance is merely less than expected.So if they got the expectations wrong then health insurance premium costs could have risen a lot but still be below the inflated expectations. Beating expectations is simply not evidence that costs have been reduced, historically or otherwise. Double wanker.

Thought of the Day

Milbank: “There has been an element of sabotage in slowing these
(exchanges) down, the exchanges are not working in states where there
are Republican governor not participating in the exchanges. In the
larger picture here, if the Republicans continue to cast doubt on
Obamacare, make it look like a disaster in all areas and all its
manifestations, it means the young people they need to get to enroll in
the program don’t want anything to do with the disaster an it becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy. So there is logic to having hearings and
complaining about the thing…”

Apparently Republican “doubts” forced Sebelius to botch her
gazillion-dollar website. Republican “doubts” forced Obama to lie about
his law for three years. Republican “doubts” are forcing insurance
companies to cancel insurance, driving doctors out of practice, and
making Obama’s defenders say plainly idiotic things.

Mr. Bernstein accuses the Republicans of "sabotaging" Obamacare. His arguments in support therefor are pitifully weak. Here we go.

He narrows his accusation against the Republicans.

I’m talking about actions designed — usually openly — not to make the
law work better in their view, but to make it harder for the law to work
well.

Open sabotage. Wow, the Republicans sure are brazen wreckers. How did they do this wrecking Mr. Bernstein? I don't think there has been any amendment by Congress to the original bill, passed with no Republican support, which is now the 'law of the land.'

While some of these [Republican acts of sabotage] had obvious direct effects, most of them did not.
And it’s hard, in most cases, to draw a direct causal line between
disruptive actions and specific malfunctions in the Web site.

I'm sure Mr. Bernstein will tell us the obvious direct effects. It is hard to draw a direct casual line between any Republican action and the horrible train wreck of the Web site roll out, because any rational person would admit that there isn't any. The development of the Web site was 100% controlled by the current Administration. There was more money available (and spent) than it should have cost. There were thousands of underworked government employees in the HHS and elsewhere to help. There was the super genius in the White House to help with the tricky parts. Sorry, laddie, this is solely the Democrats' baby. But wait, Bernstein has an explanation for not being able to support his accusation with any, uh, actual evidence.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to believe that any of these actively helped
make the program run smoothly, and very easy to believe that the
cumulative effect had at least some part to play in the October fiasco.
So with all that said, here’s a very incomplete set of eight ways that
Republicans attempted, perhaps successfully, to undermine the ACA:

Wait, the Republicans only tried to undermine a law they all opposed and this attempt was "perhaps" successful. These waffle words are not filling me with a lot of confidence that you have any case at all. Let's see.

In particular, Senate Republicans prevented the confirmation of an
Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid until May, 2013.
That’s the agency that has the lead in getting things running. The
general conventional wisdom, almost certainly true, is that neither an
acting director or a recess appointed director has the clout within an
agency of a properly nominated and confirmed presidential appointee.

Wait, Marilyn Tavenner is now the Administrator of the CMS and was the acting administrator before Donald Berwick was "recess" appointed as the administrator from July 7, 2010 to December 2, 2011 and then it was Tavenner again as acting Administrator until she was confirmed. Before she was acting Administrator the first time, she was the Principal Deputy Administrator. If the CMS itself had anything to do with picking or supporting the Canadian firm, Conseillers en Gestion et Informatique,(which screwed the IT pooch here, as is its wont), which is doubtful, the longtime Principal Deputy and Acting Administrator may well have had things well under control. It is the worst sort of speculation to say that the leadership the President has picked for CMS was somehow made worse by the Republicans. Usually you start and end an argument with your best shot. This is a whiff. Does it get any better?

Passing on state-run exchanges: With over half the
states refusing to set up their own marketplaces, the job of the federal
government was much larger than originally envisioned. And this was
clearly not done with good intentions: ask 100 Republicans whether they
believe the states or the federal government does a better job running
things, and at least 99 are going to say the states.

Now hold on there, kitty cat. Did the Republicans amend the ACA to let the states opt out of the exchanges? No, that ability was in the original genius class scheme and it had to be in order for that part of the act to pass constitutional muster. It's the law of the land that the states did not have to set up exchanges. Bernstein is blaming the Republicans for making choices the Democrats gave them when crafting the law. Some states do administer programs better than the feds and that's mainly because the state programs are smaller than the federal program. Choosing to opt out and make the feds do it is a rational choice for some states who so choose. For the Democrats scrambling to find someone else to blame, a governor or state legislature doing just what the Democrat authored bill allows for good reasons is now sabotage. Not that compelling, Bernie. Not compelling at all.

Defunding: While the recent major defunding push
failed, House Republicans successfully restricted funding for Health and
Human Services and the agencies in charge of implementing the ACA,
forcing Secretary Sebelius (and presumably various others at the
department and various agencies) to scramble to make up for it.

Sorry, no sale, Bernie. There was never less money for the HHS than there was the year before and the year before that; and there was plenty of money to overpay the Canadian webmasters. The horrible, no good, awful sequester merely slowed the rate of growth of the government. There hasn't been a budget passed by both houses in 4 years and the funding of the government has continued by CRs which have never defunded a thing outside the military and that only marginally. Are you just making this stuff up?

Myths and lies: How many times since March 2010 has
someone at the White House or a Democrat in Congress called over to HHS
to ask about some crazy rumor that the press or a constituent was asking
about? How much time was dedicated to figuring out what it was all
about so that it could be properly refuted?

I don't know, Bernie, how many times? So the agency (with nearly 65,000 employees) was hamstrung by occasional, theoretical calls from Democrats and therefore the Canadians couldn't do their code writing business. Is that your argument? I am laughing out loud at you, right now.

The big lawsuit: Granted, there’s some legitimacy in
challenging the Constitutional status of a law, as long as it’s not
frivolous, and the partial success of the lawsuit is sufficient to show
it wasn’t entirely frivolous. Still, the type of attack involved in the
lawsuit made it clear that reform opponents, if they couldn’t defeat the
law, would be happy to leave it dysfunctional.

Wait, in Marbury v. Madison over two hundred years ago, the Supreme Court declared that it is the sole arbiter of Constitutionality of an Act or Executive action, as a co-equal third branch of government. So if there was a partially successful, non-frivolous lawsuit about the constitutionality of the ACA, all that shows is that the Republicans were right to challenge the law. So how did the lawsuit cause the Canadians to write bad code? I'm not really following the argument here. I doubt anyone is.

Other lawsuits: There have been plenty of these, and
many of them really have been frivolous. As with the one that reached
the Supreme Court, all of these have had the effect of delaying
implementation, given that the status of the law was under fire.

Does he mean the largely successful so far cases about the ACA's unconstitutional attack on religious liberty and the law of the land that protects it? How has that delayed implementation? It's the office of the Solicitor General that argues in the Supreme Court for the government. Was he or any of his staff slated to help the Canadians write code but couldn't make it because her or she had a brief due? This is not so much argument as desperation.

Medicaid expansion: Not only did the state-by-state
fights over Medicaid expansion mean that the program could not work as
intended — the ability of states to opt out opens up a large hole for
the not-quite-poor — but again, just dealing with this must have been
yet another distraction.

The successful part of the non frivolous lawsuit the Republicans properly brought against the ACA was mainly that the feds could not force the states to expand Medicaid. Some governors have taken the bait and some have wisely refused the generous federal offer to expand it and pay, for now, some of the cost of the expansion. What does that really have to do with the Canadians writing code for the Web site? This accusation is like the dog in Up saying 'squirrel.' Medicaid has figuratively nothing at all to do with the Web site or the creation of the Web site. OK, big finish:

Suppressing outreach: The administration knew that it
had a major task in publicizing the rollout. What made that harder (and,
presumably, distracted them from the critical task of making everything
work smoothly) was a bizarre and perverse effort to undermine outreach:
organizations such as the NFL were threatened if they helped to
publicize the law, and an advertising campaign attempted to scare young
people away from wanting to carry any health insurance.

I'm laughing at you again, Bernie. Good that you obliquely admit that the ACA is singularly unpopular with American citizens and needed a Madison Ave. type ad campaign to try to make it popular, but who undermined the outreach program (which, in Bernstein's twisted logic, somehow distracted the Canadians from writing good code)? Who threatened the NFL? How did running political ads telling the young voters for Obama the truth that it was a very bad deal for them to buy ACA approved health insurance suppress the Obama Administration's ability to make its pitch? Let me help you out there, nothing prevented the Obama Administration from making a pitch for the glorious roll out of the Web site. The Democrat alone controlled and produced the Web site development and roll out which were such failures because of nothing at all the Republicans did. This last argument is so thin and pathetic that I think I'm developing a case of rickets from having read it. Your arguments that anyone other than the Democrats is to blame for the problems with the ACA as written and the stupendous failure of the Web site wholly lacks any supporting evidence. You have wasted every reader's time. He keeps digging.

Again: it’s hard to draw a straight line between any of these efforts
and the administration’s failures.

That's because there is no connection between the Republican's efforts and the Administration's abject failures. No straight line, no crooked line, no dotted line-- no connection whatsoever. It's all on the Democrats.

What we do know, however, is that
time is limited; any day that a department secretary spends on one part
of her job is a day she can’t focus on a different part. And then some
of these had direct effects of increasing the amount of work the federal
government had to do (such as the decisions not to run state exchanges)
or to delay when they could do that work (such as the lawsuits). Others
restricted the resources available. And some were just distractions.

That's right Sebelius and her civil servants cannot chew gum and walk at the same time. They had to read about the lawsuits, for example, before the work day began and were thereafter demoralized and distracted from making the Canadians write better code. It must be a nice planet that Mr. Bernstein lives on--one free of the requirements of logical connections that exist here on Earth, no doubt. Last paragraph.

Which leaves the question: how does the October rollout go if none of this had happened?

Exactly as bad as it did--a complete clusterf***--because nothing you have mentioned, not a single thing, had or could possibly have had any effect on the Canadians' code writing skills.

If there had been aggressive oversight by Republicans in the House, and
perhaps a few repeal votes, but otherwise elected Republicans had done
their best to carry out the law even if they disagreed with it? We’ll
never know the answer, and again this kind of question is definitely not
intended to deflect the share of the responsibility that the president
and his administration should take. But my guess? It would have been a
whole different ballgame.

I'll forgive the bad grammar that your first 'sentence' is all dependent clause. But wait, were the Republicans supposed to have helped the Canadians write code? And if you're not trying to deflect the blame for the failure onto the Republicans, then what have you been writing about for the whole of this wretched article? It's not a guess you're peddling here, it's an illusion.

The Democrats wrote Obamacare without any input from Republicans. There were no hearings on any part of the bill as is usual with new legislation. Not a single Republican voted for the ACA. The Administration took over 3 years and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to develop the super terrific Web site for the hundreds of Americans eager to sign up and it doesn't work. It may never work. Indeed, the number of people who have lost health insurance coverage solely because of the semi-intended consequences of the ACA hugely outnumber the number of people trying to get health insurance through the Web site that doesn't work. All of that is all the Democrats' fault and there is not a single jot of blame rationally to be put on the loyal opposition. Not a jot.

Come back, Bernie. Come back to a place where facts and logic matter and rational people don't try to blame the blameless for their own blunders and failures. It's a good place here on Earth.

Obama's L-shaped Recovery

The official unemployment figures are mere shadows, penumbras, if you will, of the misery of the masses who need work. Let's compare apples to apples and look at the percentage of the population actually employed during the Reagan and Obama recessions and the dissimilar recoveries from each recession.

Under Obama and the Democrat policies starting in '06, it is a valid question to ask, "What recovery?"
More of the recession Reagan inherited took place under Carter and the Democrat policies of '74 but it was worse than the Obama recession yet it has the V shape that generally outlines the boom and bust cycle of free markets.

Not now.

Elections have consequences.

In our particular case, election of Democrats has dire consequences.

It is a nearly natural phenomenon that the deeper the fall the more rapid the recovery. It takes a lot of effort to prevent that from happening.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Thought of the Day

Is there anything that PC idiots won't try to ruin? There is a Constitutional right to free expression. There is no right not to be offended (otherwise the free expression right would be unconsitutionally chilled). Jeez,do I have to do all the thinking around here?

It's Science, Bitches

Chris Mooney, Yalie English major and Alarmist AGW true believer, has taken a break from being horribly wrong about the weather and continued the left's attack on the Republican Party at the ever slightly unhinged Mother Jones magazine. Read it here.

You see, most leftists' world vision is so narrow that they cannot comprehend the actual fact that other rational people might not share their political beliefs. Because the left tends to totalitarianism, it is not possible in their minds that their opposition might be moral, well-educated, and compassionate--for the left the opposition is always evil and stupid, or perhaps somewhat insane. The Soviet Union, for example, once they stopped merely murdering those who did not toe the Communist line, put the opposition in mental hospitals. Mooney seems to be championing that position regarding Republicans by leaning heavily on fellow Yalie "moral psychologist" Jonathan Haidt who has pioneered work in this social science field.

Here are some tid-bits:

My analysis is that the Tea Party really wants [the] Indian law of
Karma, which says that if you do something bad, something bad will
happen to you, if you do something good, something good will happen to
you," says Haidt. "And if the government interferes and breaks that
link, it is evil. That I think is much of the passion of the Tea Party.”

In other words, while you may think your political opponents are
immoral—and while they probably think the same of you—Haidt's analysis
shows that the problem instead is that they are too moral, albeit in a visceral rather than an intellectual sense.

Yeah, the tea party is made up of morons who are moral. Got it. The psychobabble continues.

"The rage on the Republican side is stronger, the Republicans have
gotten much more extreme than the Democrats have," Haidt says.

Rage or the deadly sin 'ira' is generally found in slightly insane morons, you see.

I hate to break this to you, pal, but if you're not enraged by our nation's leadership lately, you haven't been paying attention.

I think Mooney's and Haidt's opinions about the Tea Party would be much more credible if they had ever actually talked to one.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

Thought of the Day

In the course of a defiant speech at the White House, the president
rode bravely into the realm of magical thinking: “It’s time for folks to
stop rooting for its failure,” Obama said, adopting the panicked tones
of a cheap infomercial salesman. Why? “Because hardworking middle-class
families are rooting for its success.” For her part, Nancy Pelosi
offered her own insinuation yesterday, suggesting that Republicans who continued to oppose the law were guilty of “sabotage.”

I
should make it clear that I have precisely no intention whatsoever of
ceasing to “root for failure.” I am actively hoping for the abject and
embarrassing deterioration of Obamacare and I am not remotely ashamed to
admit it. I loathe the law as a piece of public policy, as a means by
which federal involvement in health care and society is being expanded
rather than reduced, and as an unlovely example of the arrogance that
presidents in the modern era have come to exhibit. Like Ed Rogers,
“I would like to see the project’s collapse deter those who think a
bigger, more domineering U.S. government is the answer to our problems.”
And, like David Harsanyi,
I want the project to fail “so hard that any residual perception among
voters that any part of it was prudent policy is completely eliminated.”

Charles Cooke, noticing, as I have, that the left nearly always blames its failures on someone else--wreckers, hoarders, saboteurs, Kulaks, Kochs or Republicans.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

A Real Birth Certificate vs. An Obama Birth Certificate

I'm almost certain that the President was born in Hawaii, although I do think he's lied about where he was born in the past. I don't need to see his birth certificate to answer the question of where was he born. I'm just curious and I'm made even more curious by my inability to get the information. What's he hiding? For many, it's the media black-out over his past and past lies (and current lies) that bugs the heck out of them. For our normal curiosity, we're listed as nuts or racists. Bite me. So the controversy has not gone away for the bulk of Americans with any interest in politics, I believe, despite the release years ago of the current form of President Obama's birth certificate. We're still curious. Let me explain with examples of my own. Here is a copy of my so called long form birth certificate, preserved through the copy technology of the early 1950s.

I thought I had lost that one (turns out my ex-wife took it with her by mistake) so, more recently, I wrote to my home state for a replacement and received this.

The new version is a "sanitized" version of the old one but printed on new technology paper. Clearly the original has a lot more information than the current form, although the current one is much more handsome an official document (although mine is a little worn).

I still want to see the President's early 1960s copy technology, so called long form birth certificate and the information it contains which the current one does not have, if any. Don't bother calling me a nut or a racist. I just want to see it because it's there (hidden).

I also want to see the President's grades (as I've recently looked at Romney's in high school; and I also know McCain's awful class rank and I previously saw President Bush's and John Kerry's grades at Yale). Part of the reason for my curiosity is that I strongly suspect the President's grades were bad and thus Obama's ability to get into good schools becomes nearly inexplicable. Nearly.

I Misunderestimated It

Here is my Spring prediction of the Arctic sea ice extent at the end of Summer this year. I said 4.6 Million square kilometers. It was 5.35, an area the size of India plus Mexico plus Cyprus. Two days later, the Antarctic reached the highest sea ice extent ever measured, 19.47 Million square kilometers, an area the size of the United States plus Australia plus Oman.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Fact Checking the Fact Checkers

Here is an article in the paper for the masses USA Today that compares skeptics about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming to the industry spokespersons in the '60s who denied smoking was bad for one's health. It is not a very apt comparison. The cancer denialists for the cigarette industry were attempting to keep that industry going strong. Who or what are the global warming deniers trying to preserve. The alarmist true believers say the global warming deniers are funded by Big Energy. This isn't true in the main. The overwhelming majority of deniers, like me, don't get a dime from the energy producers. The little bit of support (measured in thousands of dollars) that goes to a few is completely overwhelmed by the many hundreds of millions of dollars the alarmist get from the government and from tree hugger organizations. But let's get to the meat. Here are the "lies" the brain trust authors of this slanted piece actually deign to mention:

Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project: "Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant." Nope. Acting under U.S. Supreme Court direction, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that CO2 is a pollutant because of the harm it causes.

Let's start with Dr. Carter. Is it possible for a decade of average global temperature to be both downward trending and, on average, hot? Of course it can. This is not refutation but misdirection or comparing apples to oranges. Here is a graph from alarmists true believers at the Hadley Climate Research Unit at East Anglia U. Does it show cooling or not? Don't get me started on the myriad reasons to have healthy doubt about the accuracy of the global temperature data sets. Moving on.

Dr. Singer happens to be correct about the beneficial trace gas necessary for nearly all life here on Earth (the animals around deep sea hot vents don't need CO2 but everything else alive does). To say the EPA has declared the gas a pollutant is pure argumentum ad verecundiam, the authorities say it, so it must be true. Even five year olds know the parental 'because I say so' is not a compelling argument and is indeed the same sort of fallacy the genius writers use here.

Economist Joseph Bast is correct about most climate scientists not being alarmist about anthropogenic CO2. The 97% figure used by the authors here has a well known, sordid story of origin. In 2009 two researchers at the University of Illinois working for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) sent a two question survey to
10,257 earth scientists. Only about 3,000 responded. The first question was: “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global
temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively
constant?” and most people, even the most stubborn of deniers, admit that much of the 19th and 20th Cs. have been recovery from the Little Ice Age. The second question was pretty vague: "Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?" 82% of the less than 30% who responded said yes to this question, but notice that it does not ask if the change is warming or cooling of if the change is good or bad. This is not a question whether the current change in temperature is so alarming that we need to curb CO2 emission right freakin' now. But it gets worse. Only 24% of the surveys sent out were affirmative on that question. Nearly 71% were no answer/unsure. But of the yes answers the survey only counted the answers of 77 scientists who had published on the subject (and 75 of them said yes) and 75 of 77 is 97.4%. I for one am underwhelmed by this survey but look again at the statement of Mr. Bast. He says most scientists do not believe that human activities "threaten to disrupt the Earth's climate." That's different from the second question of the near joke survey. Mr. Bast says there is no alarmism in the main, the authors of the USA Today article say 97% of scientists think humans have a significant effect on climate. I'm not seeing a refutation in the manipulated (and to my mind false) 97% "consensus" number. The Bast statement and the survey question are separate things. You can believe that humans have an effect but not be alarmed by that effect.

The authors of the piece want denier's 'stakes in the action' reported on so that you know the bias of the oil coal and natural gas myrmidons. (There is no mention of the Billions in government grants and private charity stakes the researchers finding alarming changes have). But the revelation after the article tends to undercut the disinterested journalist mask the authors had maintained through out the article. Revealed was this:

Dan Becker directed Sierra Club's Global Warming and Energy Program for 18 years before founding the Safe Climate Campaign. James Gerstenzang, who covered the environment for the Los Angeles Times is the campaign's editorial director.

Oh, so by their standard we should dismiss their article without examining their arguments because they are alarmists supported by those who believe in the alarmism.
I'd rather look at their arguments, such as they are, and let the bias alone. That's what I hope I have done here.

Tuesday, October 08, 2013

More Than A Dozen Reasons to Go to Burning Man Next August

Still Peddling the Big Lie

Here is a rather shrill article on global warming climate change from a true believer. It's interesting to note that most of the article is generally a complaint that no one seems to care about global warming any more. The author seems to think that the Tsunami in Japan in 2011 was caused by global warming when it was wholly the result of an undersea earthquake which even theoretically has nothing whatever to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Perhaps I read that paragraph wrong.

Then comes the alarmists' new position: A tiny increase in the tiny amount of the beneficial trace gas CO2, necessary for almost all life here on Earth, is causing ever more extreme weather. It's a complete lie. The weather is not getting more extreme. See for yourself.

I unfortunately can't seem to copy any part of the article so I'll paraphrase.

She says the recent Boulder floods were "probably" the result of global warming, as were recent floods in Pakistan, India and Mexico. Likewise the fire in Arizona last year which killed 19 firefighters was "likely" enhanced by global warming. That's not very good proof.

Then she admits this: "For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say definitely, this one is climate change." (Emphasis added).

OK, if that is true, and it is, then how can you be sure, as she is about medium hurricane Sandy last year, that any particular weather event was fueled, caused, enhanced or contributed to by global warming? She answers: "It's like trying to say which cancers in a contaminated area were caused by contamination; you can't, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is connected."

So (like seeing if cancer rate increasing) one looks at the traditionally extreme weather events recorded over time, 50 years is a good time axis, 100 years is better (last week is not long enough) and see if the number of extreme events has risen in frequency, or in destructive power. Are any?
The answer is not one measurement of traditional extreme weather over 50 years in length shows any such rise in frequency or power or destructive results (measuring increased damage in today's dollars merely records the shrinking of the dollar's buying power and is not a measure of the extreme nature of a natural disaster).

You see, the alarmists, which Ms. Solnit certainly is, have had to paint themselves into this corner of "extreme weather" increase because the climate models are all wrong and the global average temperature (such as it is) has not increased in nearly two decades and has actually gone down in the last decade. There is no alarmism available in a falling temperature (although there should be as the inevitable return of the glacial period will be far worse for us than any warming scenario made up from whole cloth by the alarmists). The trouble is, there just isn't any, you know, evidence that extreme weather is increasing over the long haul. None. Indeed, what all the measurements show is the normal sine curve all weather related phenomena show over long periods of time. Actually, lately the weather is getting less extreme.

Ever more shrill and ever more inaccurate and ever more sure. That's the climate change alarmists' position in 2013 and in the foreseeable future.

Four

Four
months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and injured
hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media attention,
and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate change probably fueled
the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado, that killed seven people
in mid-September, but amid the copious coverage, it was barely mentioned
in the media. Similarly, in Mexico, 115 people died in unprecedented floods in the Acapulco area (no significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly are halving Pakistan’s economic growth (no significant mention), and 166 bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods (no significant mention).
Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa
every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to
follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced
by climate change, took the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona
blazes amid record heat waves in July. Again, climate change generally
wasn’t the headline on that story.
(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of
the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters
of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say
definitely, this one is climate change. It’s like trying to say which
cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the contamination; you
can’t, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is
connected.)
Not quite a year ago, a climate-change-related hurricane drowned people when superstorm Sandy hit a place that doesn’t usually experience major hurricane impact, let alone storm surges
that submerge amusement parks, the New York City subway system and the
Jersey shore. In that disaster, 148 people died directly, nearly that
many indirectly, losses far greater than from any terrorist incident in
this country other than that great anomaly, 9/11. The weather has now
become man-made violence, though no one thinks of it as terrorism, in
part because there’s no smoking gun or bomb—unless you have the eyes to
see and the data to look at, in which case the smokestacks of coal
plants start to look gun-like and the hands of energy company CEOs and well-paid-off legislators begin to morph into those of bombers.
- See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/176520/our-house-fire-reality-our-changing-climate#sthash.eXcyL6j5.dpuf

Four
months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and injured
hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media attention,
and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate change probably fueled
the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado, that killed seven people
in mid-September, but amid the copious coverage, it was barely mentioned
in the media. Similarly, in Mexico, 115 people died in unprecedented floods in the Acapulco area (no significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly are halving Pakistan’s economic growth (no significant mention), and 166 bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods (no significant mention).
Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa
every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to
follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced
by climate change, took the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona
blazes amid record heat waves in July. Again, climate change generally
wasn’t the headline on that story.
(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of
the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters
of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say
definitely, this one is climate change. It’s like trying to say which
cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the contamination; you
can’t, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is
connected.)
- See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/176520/our-house-fire-reality-our-changing-climate#sthash.URQ9citD.dpuf

Four
months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and injured
hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media attention,
and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate change probably fueled
the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado, that killed seven people
in mid-September, but amid the copious coverage, it was barely mentioned
in the media. Similarly, in Mexico, 115 people died in unprecedented floods in the Acapulco area (no significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly are halving Pakistan’s economic growth (no significant mention), and 166 bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods (no significant mention).
Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa
every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to
follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced
by climate change, took the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona
blazes amid record heat waves in July. Again, climate change generally
wasn’t the headline on that story.
(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of
the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters
of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say
definitely, this one is climate change. It’s like trying to say which
cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the contamination; you
can’t, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is
connected.)
- See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/176520/our-house-fire-reality-our-changing-climate#sthash.URQ9citD.dpuf

Four
months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and injured
hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media attention,
and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate change probably fueled
the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado, that killed seven people
in mid-September, but amid the copious coverage, it was barely mentioned
in the media. Similarly, in Mexico, 115 people died in unprecedented floods in the Acapulco area (no significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly are halving Pakistan’s economic growth (no significant mention), and 166 bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods (no significant mention).
Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa
every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to
follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced
by climate change, took the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona
blazes amid record heat waves in July. Again, climate change generally
wasn’t the headline on that story.
(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of
the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters
of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say
definitely, this one is climate change. It’s like trying to say which
cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the contamination; you
can’t, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is
connected.)
- See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/176520/our-house-fire-reality-our-changing-climate#sthash.URQ9citD.dpuf

Four
months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and injured
hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media attention,
and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate change probably fueled
the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado, that killed seven people
in mid-September, but amid the copious coverage, it was barely mentioned
in the media. Similarly, in Mexico, 115 people died in unprecedented floods in the Acapulco area (no significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly are halving Pakistan’s economic growth (no significant mention), and 166 bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods (no significant mention).
Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa
every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to
follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced
by climate change, took the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona
blazes amid record heat waves in July. Again, climate change generally
wasn’t the headline on that story.
(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of
the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters
of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say
definitely, this one is climate change. It’s like trying to say which
cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the contamination; you
can’t, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is
connected.)
- See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/176520/our-house-fire-reality-our-changing-climate#sthash.URQ9citD.dpuf

Four
months ago, two bombers in Boston murdered three people and injured
hundreds in a way spectacularly calculated to attract media attention,
and the media obeyed with alacrity. Climate change probably fueled
the colossal floods around Boulder, Colorado, that killed seven people
in mid-September, but amid the copious coverage, it was barely mentioned
in the media. Similarly, in Mexico, 115 people died in unprecedented floods in the Acapulco area (no significant mention of climate change), while floods reportedly are halving Pakistan’s economic growth (no significant mention), and 166 bodies were found in the wake of the latest Indian floods (no significant mention).
Climate change is taking hundreds of thousands of lives in Africa
every year in complex ways whose causes and effects are difficult to
follow. Forest fires, very likely enhanced
by climate change, took the lives of 19 firefighters facing Arizona
blazes amid record heat waves in July. Again, climate change generally
wasn’t the headline on that story.
(For the record, climate change is clearly helping to produce many of
the bigger, more destructive, more expensive, more frequent disasters
of our time, but it is impossible to point to any one of them and say
definitely, this one is climate change. It’s like trying to say which
cancers in a contaminated area were caused by the contamination; you
can’t, but what you can say is that the overall rise in cancer is
connected.)
- See more at: http://www.thenation.com/article/176520/our-house-fire-reality-our-changing-climate#sthash.URQ9citD.dpuf

A Range of Experience

Most Americans now have absolutely no idea what the Soviet "Gulag" was. Those who survived political imprisonment there know exactly what it was. Between these two extremes are, among others, the feebly aware, the expert historians and, by far the majority of these middle tiers, those who read some Solzhenitsyn, like me.

When the socialist paradise began to decay and fail because socialism is anti-human nature and can never work (Sweden being an exception to this general rule), those in power used to blame the natural failure on wreckers and hoarders. A lot of innocent people went to prison for the imaginary crime of wrecking some subset of the current master economic plan.

I've been waiting for some years for charges of wrecking and hoarding to be made by Democrats here in the United States. Now, that the roll out of Obamacare is a general train wreck, I'm beginning to get some whiffs of the old charges, here, here and here, to link to only a tiny sample. The modern American socialists use the French word sabotage instead of wrecker but the charge is exactly the same with exactly the same validity as in the Soviet Union many decades ago.

Postcard of the Day

Saturday, October 05, 2013

A Tip of the Hat to Give Proper Respect to a Worthy Adversary

Vo Nguyen Giap has died. Verses of Kipling's Fuzzy Wuzzy keep running around my interior. I agree that he was the architect of the Viet Minh's defeat of the French to end that 8 year war (I'm unclear how much he is to be credited for destruction of Groupement Mobile 100 in the central highlands in 1954, the second of the one two punch (with Dien Bien Phu) to drop the French). He was also the architect of the seemingly disastrous Tet Offensive in our 8 year war there. The VC were rendered combat ineffective for the rest of the war by this stand and fight strategy and we absolutely stomped them and the hoped for general uprising in the South never came within a mile of happening. But the American media gave this defeat for the Vietnamese Communist just the sort of coverage that turned it into a Phyrric Victory, as we suddenly lost the stomach to go the real distance to enforce the Truman Doctrine. Despite our winning the war and getting a peace treaty signed by the enemy, Democrats stabbed the South Vietnamese in the back and threw away our hard fought victory; and the source of that desire was Giap's Tet plan.

Then the real suffering started. However, despite his willingness to take horrendous casualties, his horrible politics and the good fortune our press gave to turn his worst mistake into victory, he was a first class fighting man.

Cartoon of the Day

Inability to See What's Right In Front of Your Nose

My apologies to Eric Blair for screwing up his quote. I notice that a lot of my stories now start with, "When I was a young man..." Such is the way of 60-year-olds, which I am, so suck it up.

When I was a young man, we used to have a federal budget process. Elected officials and their clever staff would look at the leviathan spending as the blind men examined the elephant and would debate in committee and on the floor some very slight fine tuning to the ever increasing spending, much of it completely wasted.

But even that modest effort ended with the Obama Administration. Although required by law to present and pass a budget, the Democrat controlled Senate refused. They did so for political reasons, for to reveal to potential voters their tax and spending desires would have hurt them in election years. There was no budget for 4 years and therefore certainly no discussion or debate about any of the several Trillion dollars of federal spending. The President has to present a budget by a deadline as well. President Obama rarely completed his task on time and most of his budgets were bad jokes; the 2013 fiscal year received not a single favorable vote in the Senate, not even one from yellow dog Democrats.

So we've been running the federal government for a half decade by continuing resolution, the CR. It's a vote to keep going or stop. We keep going. We keep going with ever more spending and we outspend even that increase.

Since any rational person with this historical knowledge would put the blame for this sad state of affairs on the people who caused it, the Democrats, that's whom I'll blame. I know that the Democrats finally did what the law requires last Spring and put together a bad joke budget which went nowhere but I argue, with no small amount of reason and fact behind me, the Democrat-caused reliance on the CR allowed them to pass a Potemkin Village budget which was never intended to be presented to the President for his signature and which understated the actual spending and overspending. They now rely politically on the CRs through which the Democrats "sneak" their massive spending past the voters.

Having an all or nothing outcome is not optimal. We sucked at keeping the budget cut nearer the bone (we rarely exfoliated a few dead skin cells) even when we had a working budget process, but without one, our increase in spending and borrowing shifted into high gear. See chart below.

The all or nothing nature of the CR also caused the loyal opposition (Republicans) to try to slow spending and borrowing by attaching some restraint to the wording of the CR. The House is Constitutionally required to start all spending bills. But now the President and Senate say the CR is some kind of constitutional Scapular and it must continue to be all or nothing, otherwise something bad will happen. They long ago wouldn't allow the normal give and take of building a budget and now they won't even countenance any political opposition to the overspending being contained in the CR. They call the Republicans, responding to their constituents and trying to slow spending and borrowing by the only method left, bad names. Typical Democrat argument, go ad hominem early and often, because nothing can convince an opponent to agree with you like calling him or her a terrorist or other criminal. I'm no big fan of the Republican leadership, but my contempt for the Democrats is growing exponentially.

So are the largely made-up government shut down horror stories recently in the media putting the blame for the deadlock primarily on the Republicans. Yes, as usual. Is it working to hurt Republican election chances next year? At this point, I don't think so. Unless you are employed by the Government, nothing much bad is happening with the partial shut-down. The non-essential part of the Government is wholly foregoable it seems. We see the silly horror stories being shopped by the media more as liberal vindictiveness than Republican extremism or, gasp, anarchy. I guess that could change. I'm hoping, but not betting, that the Republicans hold firm and the Democrats cave. Might be wishful thinking there.

As a closing thought, please know that because of tax and FICA withholding of part of nearly every American paycheck each week or two weeks or month, the federal government takes in a couple hundreds Billion dollars each month. This amount of withheld tax money is much greater than the monthly debt service, (about $40 Billion/month). So there is no possibility of a debt default. Even the shut-down government can pay the vig. So if anyone says the Republicans in the House are risking debt default by our federal government by their not presenting a "clean" CR, as the Democrats demand, that person is lying to you. Default on the debt is not yet remotely possible for lack of a budget, CR or debt ceiling raise. Please remember the people who are lying like this and don't trust them to tell you the truth. Things will be slightly clearer to you in the future.

Thoughts of the Day

Way back in January, when it emerged that
Beyoncé had treated us to the first ever lip-synched national anthem at a
presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange
pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political
institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies
to government “crises,” too — such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt
“ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current
railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been
simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.
This
week’s “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers (at least for
those of us curious to see it reduced to Somali levels) from the awkward
fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down
at all. Indeed, much of it cannot be shut down. Which is the
real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security,
Medicare, et al.) is authorized in perpetuity — or, at any rate, until
total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the
debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control
of Congress’s so-called federal budget process. That’s why you’re
reading government “shutdown” stories about the PandaCam at the
Washington Zoo and the First Lady’s ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.
[...]
The perfect symbol of the shutdown-simulacrum so far has been the
World War II Memorial. This is an open-air facility on the National Mall
— that’s to say, an area of grass with a monument at the center. By
comparison with, say, the IRS, the National Parks Service is not usually
one of the more controversial government agencies. But, come
“shutdown,” they’re reborn as the shock troops of the punitive
bureaucracy. Thus, they decided to close down an unfenced open-air site —
which oddly enough requires more personnel to shut than it would to
keep it open.
So the Parks Service dispatched their own vast army
to the World War II Memorial to ring it with barricades and yellow
“Police Line — Do Not Cross” tape strung out like the world’s longest
“We Support Our Troops” ribbon. For good measure, they issued a warning
that anybody crossing the yellow line would be liable to arrest — or
presumably, in extreme circumstances, the same multi-bullet ventilation
that that mentally ill woman from Connecticut wound up getting from the
coppers. In a heartening sign that the American spirit is not entirely
dead, at least among a small percentage of nonagenarians, a visiting
party of veterans pushed through the barricades and went to honor their
fallen comrades, mordantly noting for reporters that, after all, when
they’d shown up on the beach at Normandy it too had not been officially
open.
[...]
The World War II Memorial exists thanks to some $200 million in private
donations — plus $15 million or so from Washington: In other words, the
feds paid for the grass. But the thug usurpers of the bureaucracy want
to send a message: In today’s America, everything is the gift of the
government, and exists only at the government’s pleasure, whether it’s
your health insurance, your religious liberty, or the monument to your
fallen comrades. The Barrycades are such a perfect embodiment of what
James Piereson calls “punitive liberalism” they should be tied round
Obama’s neck forever, in the way that “ketchup is a vegetable” got hung
around Reagan-era Republicans. Alas, the court eunuchs of the Obama
media cannot rouse themselves even on behalf of the nation’s elderly
warriors.

Friday, October 04, 2013

Thought of the Day

Wednesday, October 02, 2013

Taking the Head Fake

I admit that I did not do very well with my prediction about the final episode of Breaking Bad. I believed he regained a purpose after seeing Elliot and Gretchen on TV dis his contribution to Grey
Matter and that purpose was revenge. How wrong was I. However, I was missing some information and as neatly as the final episode tied up loose ends it never let us know what caused Walt to leave suddenly Gretchen's parents' place and buy out of the company for a pittance. Did he feel cheated or was it personal, an affaire de coeur? Nobody knows.

The finale circled back to Gretchen and
Elliott Schwartz, Walt’s former partners at Gray Matter. Walt broke into
their mansion and cleverly blackmailed the couple into providing his
children with the millions he couldn’t give them directly. And it was a
delicious scene: When Elliott fearfully brandished a small blade, Walt
said gently, “Elliott if we’re going to go that way, you’ll need a
bigger knife.”

But the show never fully spelled out why
Walt broke away from Gretchen and Elliott in the first place.

There were hints throughout the series. On
several occasions, Walt accused them of cheating him out of his share;
that bitterness seemingly helped steer him into his life of crime. But
it wasn’t clear that his version was correct — in an episode where they
confront each other at a restaurant, Gretchen said that Walt left her
without any explanation. And the true story never came out.

“Breaking Bad” brilliantly tracked Walt’s
transformation from teacher to criminal mastermind. But it’s still a
mystery why that talented chemist turned his back on fame and fortune
and became a humble high school chemistry teacher.

That is one secret Walter White took to the grave.

I also thought they'd let Todd survive just to mess with our sense of justice, in order to be an anti-Hollywood ending. Sorry to say, Hollywood is a very powerful and pervasive influence. Not that I liked Todd or any of the neo-Nazis for that matter.

This paragraph from the NYT is also a hidden criticism of the show, usually more realistic about Walt's abilities.

Then again, the episode began with Walter still alive but already a
ghost, walking in and out of secured mansions, public diners and even
Skyler’s house undetected, almost as if invisible.